As the two walked through the various points made in the amicus brief, Scott wandered into a digression about how the “women who are fussing on the left” about wanting to eventually see equal numbers of men and women in Congress should also oppose marriage equality, because if you ban gay marriage, there will be an equal number of men and women in each marriage.

“By 2020, they want 50/50 in the state houses and the U.S. House and Senate. They want 50 percent women and 50 percent men, they want 50/50, they want equality,” she said. “So my laugh is, why wouldn’t you want equality in a marriage? Why aren’t those same women wanting that same argument at home? Because we know children do better when they’re raised by their biological parents.”

This led McLarty to explain that “the extreme feminist movement and the gay liberation movement really is using same-sex marriage as a way to destroy marriage.”

“The feminist movement, they’ve been against marriage from the beginning, against traditional marriage, and it was up until the Massachusetts court case in 2003 where they recognized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts that they kind of changed their tune,” she said. “And now they see that this would also destroy marriage, so they’re for same-sex marriage.”

This led Scott to a discussion of civil unions, which she said she also can’t support because there is still the issue of “the act” that “God has not condoned,” and so allowing civil unions is “asking your fellow citizens to embrace something that goes against their First Amendment religious protections.”

“Well, it doesn’t make sense to me, because the whole point of our concern with the same-sex marriage is that the act, that God has not condoned it,” she explained. “I can’t condone what he’s condemned. I just can’t go there. So to ask or to force American citizens to condone something that’s against their deeply held religious convictions is wrong. So whether you call it marriage or you call it a civil union, you’re still asking your fellow citizens to embrace something that goes against their First Amendment religious protections.

End Times broadcaster Rick Wiles said on his “Trunews” radio program yesterday that the military exercise may be designed to spark a reaction in southern and western states, which could then be put down by the federal government. He boasted that he made the not-at-all-vague prediction that “2015 will be the year that we will see significant trouble in the United States of America.”

Last month, Wiles said that Jade Helm 15 would be America’s version of the “Night of the Long Knives” and alleged that the drill is “the preparation for or the actual implementation of a roundup of patriotic men who have the capacity to influence and inspire the citizenry to resist a coup against the Republic.”

“InfoWars,” the conspiracy theory network, reacted to the news by wondering whether Abbott is actually saying that “the Texas military is going to work with the Jade Helm forces in conducting these exercises.” (About 6:25 in, you can also watch Alex Jones reveal some body-building photos of himself).

Alan Keyes is out with a column today suggesting that President Obama, his opponent in the 2004 U.S. Senate election in Illinois, is using the riots in Baltimore to begin “consolidating dictatorial power” in order to impose “totalitarian central control” over the nation.

“Though many refuse to admit it, the American people are already into the first courses of a new civil war,” Keyes writes, claiming that the nation is divided between those who call “upon the Creator, God” and Obama and the demonstrators in Baltimore who believe in “raw, material power, where justice is the good of the stronger.”

He then compares the current Baltimore protesters to the Confederate sympathizers and Lincoln opponents who rioted in the city in 1861 against the Civil War: “Baltimore is ablaze with riotous violence, as it was in early courses of the last Civil War. This time, too, that violence may come, on demand, from those who hate the premises of America’s Declaration of right, rights and justly delimited government.”

Or worse still for the elitist faction propagandists, they might react by raising such issues in racial terms. They might wonder aloud whether it is merely coincidence that, under the leadership of the man elected as “the first Black American President” the nation has declined in economic terms and in terms of social cohesion and international respect.

They might question the wisdom, and suspect the motivation of people who insist on defining issues that involve respect for fundamental and unalienable human rights and dignity in terms that instead offer excuses for replacing state and local self-government with increasingly totalitarian central control.

The question of what happened to Freddie Gray is first and foremost an issue of justice for an individual human being. In addition to legal and political processes and contacts, non-violent public demonstrations may be needed to make sure that issue is addressed. But riotous acts supersede and distract from it. They make it more difficult and unlikely that simple justice will be served. The individual’s death becomes fodder in a struggle for power in which demands for justice are simply ammunition.

This is, of course, exactly how socialist ideologues look upon individual human beings. Socialism is about impersonal “forces of history”, not God-endowed, uniquely created human persons. Individualism dissolves into the wave of history, only taking distinctive shape again in the dictatorial personalities who signify its leading edge.

…

Though many refuse to admit it, the American people are already into the first courses of a new civil war. This time it is not about the wound inflicted by an injustice that defies our ground of unity. It about whether we shall continue to stand upon that ground, which is an understanding of justice that transcends human will and power. In this war, one side calls upon the Creator, God. The other evokes no god but History: i.e., the heartless progression of events determined in the end by raw, material power, where justice is the good of the stronger, and no injustice is acknowledged but in the complaints of those too weak and powerless to impose their will.

Baltimore is ablaze with riotous violence, as it was in early courses of the last Civil War. This time, too, that violence may come, on demand, from those who hate the premises of America’s Declaration of right, rights and justly delimited government. Others will twist Baltimore’s present smoldering this way and that to serve their stupid, selfish ambitions. But the true diagnosis of its plight lies beyond political parties, or factional ambition and racial manipulation.

“Some people think that I hate gay people, that I’m a homophobe; I’m not,” Carson said. “Jesus Christ was not a homophobe. Jesus Christ loved everybody regardless of their lifestyle but he offered them other ways to do things. It’s a free country, people can do what they want to do, but they don’t get to change the definition of marriage, which is between one man and one woman. I’m concerned by the fact that we’re not paying attention to the Constitution the way we should.”

Carson said that Congress should exercise its “right to rein in judges who don’t abide by the will of the people,” adding that “what we the people have got to do is insist that Congress carry out their duties.”

Today's "WallBuilders Live" radio program was dedicated entirely to an interview that Rick Green and David Barton recently conducted with Kent Hovind, the right-wing folk hero known as "Dr. Dino" from his days running Dinosaur Adventure Land, a creationist theme park in Florida.

Hovind has spent most of the last decade in prison for "structuring" in an effort to avoid paying federal income tax on the grounds that all of the money generated by his theme park belonged to God. He is currently facing even more legal troubles stemming from his alleged efforts to illegally prevent the government from selling off properties seized from him in the original tax case.

Today's WallBuilders interview was entirely one-sided, as Green and Barton more or less allowed Hovind to tell his side of the story unchallenged as he repeatedly insisted that he had never broken any laws and had never done anything wrong and, at one point, even compared himself to Job.

After Green noted that Hovind has not received much support from the conservative Christian community because many believe Hovind to be nothing more than a tax protestor, Hovind insisted that he was nothing of the sort.

"People who say that about me," Hovind asserted, "are doing the same thing Job's friends did to him. Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar, they said 'Job, you had to do something wrong or this wouldn't have happened.' Their whole song and dance for the whole book of Job was 'Job, you had to sin.' Finally, God had to explain it to them in Chapter 42, guys, go tell Job you're sorry. And so maybe that will happen in my case":

Carson said that people in cities need guns to defend against Big Government gun confiscations and potential attacks, even going so far as to suggest that ISIS wouldn’t have made such advances in Iraq if there were more firearms in the country.

He also claimed that Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher and “Leviathan” author, knew that tyranny “would never occur in America because American citizens have guns and they won’t let it happen.” Hobbes, of course died in 1679, a century before the U.S. was established:

Actually, as I’ve stated, that was expressed with the wrong emphasis. Because I don’t have any problem with any American having any weapon that they can legally have, that’s what the Second Amendment is for and that’s what it talks about. What I was referring to all the carnage I’ve seen and all the operating that I’ve seen that’s been caused by those weapons falling in the wrong hands. But I subsequently had multiple conversations with the NRA leadership and a lot of people who knew a lot more about it than I did and I tried to make it very clear to people that the second amendment is there for a very important reason.

Number one, to make sure that the citizens could assist the military in case of invasion, and to think that that is farfetched, all you have to do is go to the Middle East and see some of the things that are happening there. I have a friend who is a missionary doctor, called me two weeks ago quite distressed, he was over in Iraq, went back to one of the villages that they had helped in before and it was desolate, ISIS had gotten there before them, killed all the men, taken the women captive, I mean, if those people had the ability to defend themselves maybe that wouldn’t have happened. To think that we are completely isolated from that I think is silly, particularly knowing that there are cells in this country right now.

But the most important reason for the Second Amendment is so that our people could protect themselves in case our government went off the rails and started thinking it could dominate the people. You know, we think that that is farfetched but you know you look at what has happened historically to nations where the government did become tyrannical and what did they do first? Get rid of people’s guns. Get rid of people’s guns rights. It was Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher of the 17th century when talking about tyranny in Europe, he said it would never occur in America because American citizens have guns and they won’t let it happen.

In an interview with the Iowa conservative blog Caffeinated Thoughts on Saturday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker repeated his call for a constitutional amendment to preserve state-level bans on same-sex marriage if the Supreme Court strikes them down, immediately before dodging a question on an anti-choice “personhood” amendment by saying that if he were president he wouldn’t “handle any constitutional amendments.”

Walker told Caffeinated Thoughts’ Shane Vander Hart that he is “still hoping” the Supreme Court will preserve state-level marriage bans. “If they don’t,” he added, “the only other viable option out there is to support a constitutional amendment, again, believing, I believe in not just in marriage being defined as one man and one woman, but I also believe in states’ rights. I think that’s an issue that appropriately belongs in the states.”

When Vander Hart asked Walker “what kind of pro-life legislation would a President Walker sign,” and if that would include a “personhood law,” Walker responded. “Well, the personhood would require an amendment and the president, no matter who it is, doesn’t handle any constitutional amendments, so that would be something that people who are passionate about that in the Senate need to have leaders there.”

Robertson cited riots in Baltimore and Ferguson, legal abortion and the Supreme Court’s attempt to “bring in sodomy and put it in the Constitution” as signs that country is straying from biblical values, warning that the U.S. would be “doomed” without the voices of religious fundamentalists like himself.

“Sooner or later, a holy God is going to say, ‘I’ve had enough with you, I’ve had enough, my hands are going to be taken off your nation,’” he said. “People mock the word of God and those who proclaim it are laughed at as fundamentalists. Well, we need the fundamentalists because if we don’t have them this nation is doomed.”

Rep. Louie Gohmert appeared on Glenn Beck's television program last night, where he repeated his allegation that the Obama administration is refusing to help the government of Nigeria fight the radical Islamist group Boko Haram until the country legalizes gay marriage and abortion. (In reality, the U.S. has held off on some assistance because Nigeria's military has been involved in human rights abuses and several Nigerian military leaders were even convicted of arming Boko Haram).

"This administration has demanded that they change the law to accept gay marriage," Gohmert asserted, saying that he heard from fellow members of Congress who had traveled to Nigeria and spoke with local religious leaders that the Nigerian government had been told by the United States that they would not be helped in their fight against terrorism "unless we legalize same-sex marriage."

"You want us to give up our religious beliefs," Gohmert reported that the Nigerian leaders had asked in disbelief, "and we have to start paying for abortion or you're not going to help us?"

"Glenn, we have elected leaders in this country and we're allowing them to get away with this kind of thing," the Texas congressman concluded. "As a nation, we will be judged and it doesn't usually go well for nations that turn this far away from their deeply-held religious beliefs":

Liberty University’s Matt Barber took anti-gay activists’ vow to disobey a Supreme Court ruling for marriage equality to its extreme yesterday, telling Iowa radio host Steve Deace that if the court strikes down bans on same-sex marriage, it will “no longer be legitimate” as a court.

Saying that such a ruling would be the “Dred Scott of marriage,” Barber told Deace that if the justices “presume to redefine the institution of marriage, thereby destroying the institution of natural marriage, this Supreme Court will no longer be legitimate.”

Barber said that there “would be no rationale” for such a decision. “There’s no constitutional rationale,” he said, “there’s no historical rationale, there’s no biological rationale, there simply is no rationale other than that they want it so very badly, ‘they’ being homosexual activists and other cultural Marxists, leftists, people who are seeking to undermine the institution of natural marriage and ultimately God’s design for human sexuality.”

When Deace asked him what would happen if the Supreme Court were to side with anti-gay activists on the marriage issue, Barber echoed his colleague Mat Staver in saying that the movement would have to then get to work making sure that gays and lesbians can no longer get married anywhere in the U.S.

First, he said, the movement would have to work to repeal state-level judicial decisions instituting marriage equality, “and then work from there to make sure that marriage is not redefined in any of our 50 states here and to undo the damage that has already been done.”